Last time I posted here, I was reprimanded by veteran MBers for writing things that were offensive to posters here. In retrospect I think what I wrote were in fact inconsiderate. I apologize for that.

My intentions were questioned too. However much I think about it, the only reason I can think of for my interest is, that my outlook towards love and the institution of marriage is skewed to a point of extreme cynicism after finding out people who are otherwise honest, selfless and good, do become cheaters. I did not want to feel cynical about marriage,about the wonderful couples I know and about even my own past/future relationships. I knew already fidelity is not something that can be taken for granted. But still wanted to convince myself that FWS are not bad people (maybe WS are bad people. Not the FWS).

Anyway, like I was told I did �go read the book�. I did not read SAA or HNHN�but went through the articles available in this site. I have got many of my questions answered. If I couldn�t find answers, I hope I can try and ask them here in the most polite and considerate way I can, in the future.And there was one such question. So,I am posting here.

I was reading the story of one of the veterans and found out his FWW had an EA despite both of them claiming what they had was a happy marriage.I will not mention the poster�s handle, lest be accused of trying to �straighten him out�. Will just ask some general questions from his specific story.

My question is about the affairs that happen in happy marriages.If you have done most things right and yet there was one EN that you neglected which got fulfilled by the OP, then does that make the OP more attractive to your spouse than you are?
I do understand that the WS develops feelings for OP. But are those feelings capable of becoming stronger than the ones that s/he has for the BS, given that s/he is already in love with the BS and considers the marriage to be good.
Or have I got it entirely wrong here? Is the WS taking away all or most of the love s/he has for the BS and investing it in the OP?

Reading more of his posts, I understand that he feels if it wasn�t for his Plan A, his FWW would have simply packed and left for the OM. I do not contest his claims about the effectiveness of Plan A. But only the relevance of Plan A to his situation. Of course, Plan A must have helped him to maintain some sanity in his marriage during the post D-day drama, by ensuring there were no more LB$$ withdrawals. But is that what made his FWW fall in love with him again? Could she have even fallen out of love or loved him less in the first place?

His FWW too felt the marriage was good, that he was the best husband and that he meant everything to her. This really confounded me. I naturally would want to believe that she would have still loved him more than she loved the OM and stayed with him even if he had not Plan Aed.But since most of my assumptions get shattered time and again, I wanted to find out if this is one of my wrong assumptions?

Like I said earlier, I have reconciled with the fact that one can only ensure fidelity in her spouse by trying to meet ENs and staying in love, whereas it would be the spouse that should maintain the boundaries to stay faithful.
But how can it be that, despite meeting ENs and depositing the much needed LB$$ the BS can still have a lower credit in her Love Bank acct. than the OP, even if the case was that the OP was meeting the most important EN? Can the state of "being in love" be that volatile.


P.S: If someone does find this post offending/hurtful, please say it to me. Do not attack me personally. I am not good at handling personal attacks, even if its on the internet.

I don't know the story you're referring to here, but maybe some of your questions could be answered by also looking at people in unhappy marriages who don't cheat. Nobody can ensure that their spouse will remain faithful through any act. When someone has made the choice that it's okay to have a lover outside of marriage, that they deserve to be 'happy' and in the case of EA's, 'what's the harm?'...well, outside of it, we can see the delusional thinking there, but that's the nature of delusion--the deluded person believes it is real and true.

To answer one of your questions: excepting sociopaths, most of us have infinite love. We can fully love one person, three people, a hundred, without needing to take from one bank to put it in another.

Go ahead and read the books. Why not?

It doesn't matter the state of the marriage. If you let someone of the opposite sex meet your most important emotional needs you will fall in love with that person, regardless of your marital state.

When EN's are met it creates a Phenylethylamine or phenethylamine (PEA) reaction in your brain and you become addicted. Once addicted you turn into a wayward ... and act like a full on drug addict.

The only way to break up the PEA reaction is EXPOSING THE AFFAIR.

This can and cannot work ... it is case by case ... but on average it does help destroy the affair over time.

On average it takes 2 - 5 years for the PEA chemicals to leave the brain. PEA dies out of the brain quicker when the affairees start to lovebust each other. That usually starts quickly because the relationship is built on lies and thoughtlessness.

EXPOSURE helps to get them to lovebust, and Plan B is best because it gives the relationship the chance to kill itself without having the betrayed spouse involved.

Hence to avoid this nightmare from the beginning ... the best defense are boundaries ... Boundaries around the opposite sex is the #1 place to begin to protect marriage.

I'm going to go back and look at the practical suggestions that were made to you last time, then take a look and see if you've put any effort into trying them.

Kudos for reading the articles! That is fantastic! As you can see, it does answer a lot of questions, doesn't it.

Here's a link back to my suggestions I made before:

http://forum.marriagebuilders.com/ubbt/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2612591#Post2612591

I see that you do not want to become specific about your situation.

Review the Basic Concept of the Love Bank. That will explain to you how people fall in love, which will answer your question.

On the radio, Dr. Harley frequently talks about relationships needing both logic and passion (romantic love). Dr. Harley says that if the relationship has logic (say, the couple are similar, are married, and have children together) it is easy to create passion, but if the relationship is not logical (the couple are each married to other people, one is a drug addict, etc.) it is hard to sustain passion because their behavior will destroy it over time, even if they create it initially.

I suggested to you that you become a daily listener of Dr. Harley's FREE radio show, and I see that you haven't followed this FREE suggestion.


Yes. You have some wrong assumptions about how the feeling of love works; the Love Bank model explains it more predictably.

It might mean that an OP meets a specific need better than the spouse. And once one EN is met outside of marriage, the others are soon to follow. Affairs are always initiated by an attraction to the OP so that is not unique to waywards in good marriages.

In my husband's affair, I was meeting ALL of his needs and he still had an affair because he had poor boundaries around women.

Unmet EN's and unhappy marriages are not the common denominator in all affairs. The common denominator is a lack of boundaries around members of the opposite sex.


One can only ensure fidelity if one has appropriate boundaries and lives a transparent lifestyle that would make a secret second life possible. Having a happy, loving marriage helps, but will not ALONE ensure fidelity.

Having a great marriage that is affair proofed does not happen by accident and it is very possible if you just understand those steps. It is not a matter of luck, but a matter of design. There are very specific steps, such as creating an integrated, transparent marriage and establishing good boundaries. Affairs always begin with opposite sex friendships, so the obvious step would be to eliminate opposite sex friendships.

If these steps are followed, your marriage will be safe.

Dude, in exchange for your telling me that I'm a great pal, I'm going to put you in a room. I'm going to provide you with everything you THINK you need: food, water, entertainment, amenable fermale companionship (even a high-speed ultra-reliable internet connection.) You only need ask and anything else you might subsequently want, I will provide - UNTIL you notice it would be getting stuffy and oppressive. That's when I tell you that the room is hermetically sealed and there will be no more oxygen introduced.

Dude, how long do you think you'd last until you will promise undying fealty and devotion to the first person with a fresh oxygen tank?

I don't remember your posts, sorry.

So...what is the point of posting this? Do you have a need to apologize to people you've offended in your life, like, as some sort of compensation thing? I'm not sure where you're going with this.

Welcome back, Aaromale.

I'll repost something I posted to a WW a couple of days ago that seems pertinent to some of your questions:

Affairs can & do happen even in basically happy marriages where most needs are mostly met most of the time. In my own case, my key emotional needs hadn't been going completely unmet, but because I had sloppy boundaries, I gradually allowed someone other than my wife to begin meeting some of them better, for a spell. (It started with the admiration, and proceeded to conversation, and got worse from there.) And, <wham!>, pretty soon I -- squared-away, well-regarded, church-going, happily-married, good-dad guy that I and others saw me as -- was in an affair, and in a matter of weeks.

If you'd been able to hit me with truth serum at the time, when the affair was full-blown, I'd have told you I loved them both, OW & my wife. (Or that's what I believed back then, before I came to appreciate the distinction between love and infatuation.) I wasn't looking then to trash my marriage or bail on it, which was probably a factor favorable to our subsequent recovery; but I sure wasn't investing fully in my wife as I should've been.

So it wasn't mainly because my needs were unmet. It was because my shoddy boundaries allowed somebody else to the fore in meeting them. And why'd I do that? Basically, I'd gotten lazy. It seemed easier to indulge myself in the free attention & admiration that OW was suddenly tossing my way than to go through the convoluted deal of explaining to my wife what was going on in my head & in my life, the work that would be required to change certain circumstances in my life to take myself away from regular contact with the OW (who was a fellow singer on our church's music team), the work of communicating with my wife about some areas in which my wife could've done a better job meeting my needs, and the work of communicating & listening more attentively to her in order to be better at knowing & meeting her needs & thereby in turn maybe helping her become more enthusiastic about meeting mine. It seemed easier for me to leave my life on auto-pilot: to avoid messy conversations with my wife (aka excessive conflict-avoidance), to keep going to music team rehearsals every Thursday evening, and to indulge myself a little in the fact that here was someone who kept paying me compliments and who was allowing me a role as a sort of confidant -- after all (or so my rationalizations began), I'd been such a good guy all those years, I was entitled to a little excitement amid the long commutes and the work responsibilities and the household chores and the lonely evenings when my wife was working nightshifts. Wasn't I? (Well, that's how I started thinking, back then.) So I chose the easier path to have needs met. And that laziness was simply a manifestation of selfishness.

I don't believe there's any perfect assurance, any guarantee, that any person won't ever act very selfishly. (Find someone -- anyone -- who hasn't ever acted selfishly in their lives. I think it'll be a long quest. I doubt that there's anyone -- whether WS, BS, never-cheated, or never-married -- who hasn't acted selfishly at one point or another in his/her adult life -- even if that selfishness wasn't manifested in the form of infidelity to a spouse.) The best we can do, I think, is to narrow the probability. In a marriage, that's where need-meeting comes in. That's where having good boundaries & a habit of precautions to maintain them -- such as "I won't allow a woman other than my wife to share details of her personal life with me, and will cut off the conversation instantly if that begins to occur" or "I'll copy my wife on any non-job-related e-mails I send to any other woman", etc. -- are also useful.

One needn't believe in any particular faith to observe & become pretty skeptical of the idea that there are "bad people" and "good people" (the "bad" ones behaving badly all the time, the "good" ones behaving well all the time) -- as opposed to the idea that there are just people, some of whom do better than others at keeping their badness in check & under control. WSs are people who are doing a rotten, lazy job of that. FWSs are people who, for at least a period of time, did a rotten, lazy job of that.

But I do believe people can improve themselves with time. Narrowing the probabilities.

I think I do understand the lovebank model enough. What I really did was, I tried to reconcile my own beliefs about love with what the lovebank model says. It seemed fine in many ways. Please bear with me if this sounded unnecessarily academic. Truth is, I deliberately make it sound so, only to conceal my hopeless romanticism.

The Greeks had four different types of love � Agape: the love that is unconditional and sacrificial at the same time. What we call true love. Eros: the passionate romantic love of the lovers. Philia: the love/affection among friends. Storge: Love out of obligation.

Now, this has been my theory always. That the passionate romantic love(eros) between newlyweds gets replaced with the true love(agape) that can be seen in matured couples after a few years of marriage.

Like CWMI said people can love infinite number of people...My question was lame actually...
If you are a parent who has just had a second child, it does not have to be that you have to love your first kid less, to love your second kid.

What I really should have asked was the relative aspect of it and not the absolute one. A parent can love her kids equally. But can a WS love his lover and his BS equally?

If you are a parent and your children are drowning and you have to choose between saving one of them because there isn�t time for saving both, who will you save? No parent can choose between their children. Love is absolute here, because it is true love towards both the children.

But if a WS has to choose between his lover and his BS from drowning and he has no time to logically think over who is more important to him, but impulsively choose one of them based on who means the most to him, I think a choice can be made here. It could be either. Love is relativistic here. And that is because the WS might have true love for the BS or might have misplaced his feelings of true love towards the OP. I personally do not think romantic love will be a criteria in deciding who is important, when you have true love for one of the persons. Just as the WS deciding to leave for the OP because in his mind what he has for the OP is true love.

With that said, how I tried to reconcile this with the lovebank model was, I placed the Agape and Eros above the romantic love threshold, Agape over Eros. The WS might feel romantic love for the OP when they meet one of their unfulfilled needs, but when only when the OP starts fulfilling the rest of the needs does the WS, decide to swap the OP for the BS as the recipient of their true love. And to push down the BS from the pedestal of true love, the WS deludes himself into believing that the marriage was crappy.

Whatever I've said so far is my personal opinion. But to me this seemed logical.
�
Assuming this is correct, if I were to ask my question again, will a WW who believes that She is having a great marriage and a great spouse, �save the OM from drowning� instead?
I�m not saying that a WS cannot fall in love with an OP despite being in a happy M. But what about the case where a WS spurns the OM's suggestion to divorce their respective spouses and get together, because she believes that her marriage is great and that her husband is the best she can ever ask for ? (I now wish I had specifically cited the case I am talking about in my first post. Since I did not do it then, I can't do it now )

What I ask is that, when someone says that they have a great marriage and the best husband, then does that not indicate there is �true love� still existent? Only when you lose your true love for your BS, you will be able to leave him, right(or even say that the marriage is anything less than great)?
�
So, how is Plan A relevant for �winning back� a WW who is already deeply in love with the BS?
Isn�t there a difference between �winning her back� and �keeping him from winning her��And it�s not just a matter of semantics. Reading the posts it becomes obvious that the BS sincerely believed that his FWW was going to leave him. And that puzzled me.

Although that doesn�t change the fact the FWW in question would have been playing with fire with continued contact with OM that could have culminated in the EA becoming a PA, it still cannot mean that the same FWW who believed that she had a great marriage, will leave her BS. The FWW apparently loved her BS more than the OM and probably in a very different way. The logical conclusion where Agape triumphs over Eros.�

Why should it bother me?

The most important reason is that, if the WW had indeed been won back by the BH, then it really shatters any remaining nobleness I had attached to love for all this time. This is the one last thing i've been clinging on to, to believe love is noble. But if �true love� cannot be sustained even by your best efforts and even when it is sustained, if �true love� is not greater than �romantic love�, then i'm a total convert to cynicism.

There are other reasons too. I felt that the FWW was vilified even more than she deserved to be. I honestly mean no disrespect to the BH's feelings (BH in question - if you are reading this I apologize for making a DJ). The BH has every right to feel hurt because he was betrayed and had been lied to, before and after the D-day. But I felt the FWW's side of the story was not presented in detail. It is highly likely that the marital relationship meant the same to the FWW as it meant to the BH. Reading the posts, it seemed the FWW did not want a divorce more than the BH and that wasn't even because of some secondary reasons like financial security/kids. But I can often read too much into it. Having said that, I expect to be bashed for supporting a WW. But understand that I am not supporting her EA. I only say that she should get her due for steadfastedly loving the BH (I did warn you I was a hopeless romantic.)

@markos: I cannot get anymore specific. I can only invent a story and lie, which i do not want to.

Glove: I read your other topics too. Can you please go through the thought experiment I've wrote above and tell me what you would have done? Even if you've said you loved them both, I still do not take it that you loved them both equally. Since you did not say that yourself :P sorry for being such a nitpicker.

Melody: What would your then WH would have done?

Godgivmestrength: thanks. that is something new I've learned today. I needed to ask you some more questions on that. But that would require a separate topic, or atleast a separate post.

NeverGuessed: The analogy was good. But that will not fit the context of a happy marriage, don't you think? Maybe a suffocating/boring marriage.

P.S: About the thought experiment. I made that up to find out if I am getting past the �Philia� level affection and moving into the �Eros� level love with any of my married female friends. One of my closest friends happens to be a married woman, who has been this close to me even before she met her husband. I know that MB does not approve opposite sex relationships...And I have applied MB principles and have slowly established my boundaries with her. But before I started to establish them, I used to imagine my closest male friend and her drowning together. I've never been able to decide who to save.

Can you be more specific? I don't understand your question.

Oh, never mind, Aaromole, I see now that your question was tied to a very long hypothetical, of which I do not have the time to read.

NeverGuessed: The analogy was good. But that will not fit the context of a happy marriage, don't you think? Maybe a suffocating/boring marriage.

Analogies (similies, parables) cannot be absolutely precise because they specifically and intentionally use icons to represent the items to be illustrated. I gave you the vision of EVERY ANTICIPATED NEED being satisfied in the mythical environment, only being inadequate when a previously unsuspected need is encountered. THAT is real life, as related in the stories here.

If you want to pick nits, and make this an academic lesson in rhetoric, well....I have more pressing matters.

If my...story...helps explain the theory, great.

In a pinch you could tell the truth.

Well, you're right: I didn't say "equally". As I said, even back then, I wasn't looking to bail on my marriage. Hard to say in retrospect what I'd have done in back then my addled state of almost 4 years ago, in your "drowning-person" hypothetical scenario. IRL, I had a chance to make a choice of sorts; I could've quit on my wife, but how it actually went down was that I went home and got down on my knees on our living room carpet and begged her to keep me.

It's hard for a sober person to accurately imagine, or remember, what it feels like to be drunk; and to a staggering drunk, an accidental tumble off a bridge might just feel like a controlled descent. To a schmuck in an affair, it feels like love. Doesn't necessarily mean it is.

In your hypothetical, maybe the most Solomonic decision I could've made at the time would've been to have saved my wife and then thrown myself in.

I discovered by accident my so called Christian husband of 2 years was cheating on me. I waited and gathered more proof..cell phone data, he was subscribing to atleast 4 online sex sites paying $30 a month, plus he met women on his lunch break in his auto. I talked to him calmly and tactfully in which he informed me he was not going to stop plus I must accept his lifestyle of being a serial cheater. His last wife who died of a ongoing illness did accept this action from him, so he thought I must resign myself to this type of marriage. After having three conversations he would not change his mind, went to a local attorney, then I decided to leave the union. When he came home I was there and explained to him my reason for leaving. The thing that gets me on my whole divorced situaton is mutal and church friends snub me when I see them in public. The Ex told these people I was mentally ill and cruel to his children. That is SO untrue and unfair! I feel like taking some of his sex pictures online and profiles and mail them for all his friends to see!!! . It really boils my blood cause I loved him and his children very much. He ruined the marriage not me. He refused marital counseling and talking to our minister .I went to counseling alone and was advised to leave him since hubby refuse to change or stop the affairs. Last month Ex and his kids moved out of state, to a woman he talked to online while we were married. when I foudn that out it hurt me a lot since I tried to be the perfect wife. We got a quickie divorce and my Ex and his new woman are now engaged. It is listed on Facebook for all to see. What about me? I am still having trouble dating a man. Since divorced finalized in April 2012, still too soon for me to date.

This is why it is important to expose his affairs to them. They should understand that he was the reason why your marriage could not continue, and they should know the lifestyle he led.

Some of them may still snub you and/or be friendly to him, but at least this way you give them the chance to do the right thing and to retain the friendship.

It only takes one person to ruin a marriage,but whatever happens there are 2 sides to any story? The rock and roller from Genesis band, Phil Collins sings a song called Both Sides of the Story. They may not hear it in full detail, but there is a reality to the situation of a failing marriage. I dealt with a lot of rejection from him; it still hurts but time heals all wounds and prayer too.

There is only one side to the truth, though.

@GloveOil: What you wrote was
And how I read that was
I am sorry, I tried to paraphrase you. But what I wanted to see was if your situation of being in a happy marriage and still have an affair will fit my belief that happy marriages that face an affair will not be broken up - atleast by the WS, because the WS will rather let go of the AP than to leave the BS.

Why it matters to me is this...If I do everything right and still get cheated on, that is devastating. But beyond that, if I get ditched, that will destroy the soul won't it?

I am not in such a situation. But having read a BH say that he was in that situation, I had my doubts can it be so. Some of his statements were ambiguous. And I felt there was a [probably inadvertent] misrepresentation of the FWW side of the story. If he was right, then I will have to concede to myself that the love of a WS in a happy marriage is farcically volatile. Or to put it bluntly, love is volatile on the whole. Which I did not want to.



If faced with a make or break decision, I didn't think a schmuck in affair will go for breaking. But only you'd know better.


@NeverGuessed: Dude...I am not nitpicking. I just asked a very specific question because, I simply wanted to know if a FWS would willingly leave a happy marriage for an AP. I am sorry about the long drivel.

@Markos: Reading SAA now(skipping certain parts though..will give it a full read some other time..maybe after I read HNHN)...will write about that "truth" once I finish.

...if a FWS would willingly leave a happy marriage for an AP...

Okay, getting to the core of the issue here is whether or not unilaterally "leaving the marriage" is the worst kind of behavior a WS can engage in, or if such an act is not actually more considerate than the usual WS game of having a "secret second life."

(Potential) WSs are the craftiest and most selfish of creatures. Their goal is rarely initially (and sometimes never) to jettison their current life with their soon-to-be BS. Their goal is to enjoy a buffet from two separate serving tables, for men usually reserving family comfort ENs to the home-front, while sourcing admiration and SF, for example, from the tart next door. (Women usually re-order the take-out menu, but the principle holds.)

In my case, as objectively as I can gauge the situation, I had done everything my bride could have wanted from a loving, attentive, and devoted husband - WITH ONE VITAL EXCEPTION. She sourced that EN inappropriately, and would likely have continued down the path to marital destruction but for my almost incredible discovery of what was just happening.

Crystal-balling, then: Given another six(?) months, and then discovery, there would have been no willingness on my part to recover the union, probably to her devastation. Extend it maybe a year instead, and then have discovery, and given the stories here, she likely would not have cared if my choice was not to attempt reconciliation, having completely gone over to the "dark side".

It becomes the treading toward the slippery slope, occasioned by poor boundaries meant to prevent alternative sourcing of ENs, that have created the tragedies we deal with here.

No, not because I couldn't live without OW. But because at that point, I simply deserved to drown, and part of me realized it.

I don't know if one can put a percentage figure on the extent to which what happens to a marriage hit with infidelity hinges on what happens prior to the affair (residual goodwill, etc.) vs. the extent to which it depends on what both spouses do to save the marriage after the affair, but I think that what happens after can be just as important or more important than what happened in the marriage before the affair. And I'm not sure what you mean by "happy." "Happy" may be more of a point on a continuum than a point on either side of a bright line. Lots of marriages survive after affairs, but they may not have been "happy" before the affair and may not be "happy" after it -- instead, those marriages can limp along in a crippled state. Maybe you can call that surviving, but don't call it livin'!

That's why I think MarriageBuilders is so cool. It doesn't get caught up in deterministic predictions. It's aimed at moving a marriage toward the "happy" side of the continuum, regardless of what preceded the affair, regardless of what went on in the past.

And I think that, yes, human love is rather "volatile", as you put it. Or as I'd rather put it, it's a living thing. It's not an "either always-was-always-will-be or never-was-never-will-be" situation. Human love needs care & feeding. It needs watered. It needs nurtured & cultivated. It can degrade, fall victim to entropy, end, die. MB is about that nurture and cultivation.